This paper provides a minimalist derivation of the gravity equation and uses it to identify three common errors in the literature, what we call the gold, silver and bronze medal errors. The paper provides estimates of the size of the biases taking the currency union trade effect as an example....

Two otherwise identical firms that enter the same market in different months, one in January and one in December, will report dramatically different annual sales for the first calendar year of operations. This partial year effect in annual data leads to downward biased observations of the level...

We study how the city system is affected by the possibility for the members of the same cultural diaspora to interact across different cities. In so doing, we propose a simple two-city model with two mobile cultural groups. A localized externality fosters the productivity of individuals when...

Peaks and troughs in the spatial distributions of population, employment and wealth are a universal phenomenon in search of a general theory. Such spatial imbalances have two possible explanations. In the first, uneven economic development can be seen as the result of the uneven distribution of...

This Paper studies the welfare implications of the location decisions of innovative newcomers that, though spinning off an industrial district, may choose whether to locate inside or outside its borders. Even if this choice has always been relevant, globalization has turned the issue, whether to...

This paper presents a model in which growth and geographic agglomeration of economic activities are mutually self reinforcing processes. Industrial agglomeration in one location spurs growth because it reduces the cost of innovation in that location through a pecuniary externality due to...

We study the impact of falling trade costs and falling national transport costs on the economic geography of countries involved in an integration process. Two regions between which labour is mobile form each country, but there is no international factor mobility. Commodities can be traded both...

We use Italian firm-level data to investigate the impact of trade openness on the distribution of firms across marginal cost levels. In so doing, we implement a procedure that allows us to control not only for the standard transmission bias identified in firm-level TFP regressions but also for...

In models with heterogeneous firms trade integration has a positive impact on aggregate productivity through the selection of the best firms as import competition drives the least productive ones out of the market. To quantify the impact of firm selection on productivity, we calibrate and...

We adopt a general equilibrium approach in order to measure the effects of recent immigration on the Western German labor market, looking at both wage and employment effects. Using the Regional File of the IAB Employment Subsample for the period 1987-2001, we find that the substantial...